Cooking with Shame

I am not a cook. This is not a joke rephrase of Nixon, it is the truth. For this, I refer to (rather than blame!) my mother, who never enjoyed cooking. We are Polish, and some of those of our persuasion see cooking as a chore, like laundry, rather than a joy. When you are from a northern climate and your culture and country has been overtaken by your neighbors multiple times, you probably welcome the ease and blissful nothingness of fast food. Hence my undying love of Culver's (oh, their cod sandwich, in all its golden crispiness, with crinkle fries!)

Every few months I go through a phase where I decide I want to be a cook. Usually, it is after watching a few cooking programs on television, and it is usually a negative reaction to strange things that chefs with contracts try to foist on us (fried rice with cranberries! Dishes with cooked iceberg lettuce!!).

As mentioned earlier, I am Polish, and so I have cabbage where many of you have cartilage. This week, my husband (who CAN cook) was making pork tenderloin and asked me to pick up some jarred red cabbage to go with it. I was at my local ethnic fruit stand, and strangely, could not find the jar of red cabbage we usually have with Eastern-European influenced meals. So I said "Can't any idiot make red cabbage?"

I am here to tell you that yes, any idiot can. I found a recipe online (from Rachel Ray, proving the 'any idiot' theory) and I have now made sauteed red cabbage twice in one week, and no one has died.

My husband and I have discussed my inability to cook many times, and he has told me that I need to cook with love. My feeling up until now has been that when I purchase, chop, braise, brown, drain, serve, and clean up after cooking, love is not the first emotion that comes to mind.

But standing in the middle of a store, not able to find what I wanted, I was overcome with another emotion, one that gripped me harder than love: shame. Certainly anyone can wilt a vegetable in pan. This week, I proved that yes, anyone can.